held a bland, Olympian attitude toward life and recitations. It was our gift to practice the art of loafing to a fine success, and to have faith in its passive invitations to the soul. "If a man does not invite his soul to whatever banquet he sits down to," we argued comfortably, "he is an inhospitable churl. him not be always ploughing, harrowing, and planting with edible things. There is John Candace, who is always ploughing, and looks harrowed, and is going to seed."

Let

To "go to seed" is a phrase of importance, whose meaning may be consulted in any garden. It is to lose the aspect of conformity; it is to be no more a pleasant flower, palatable fruit, or immediate vegetable served on napery; it is to have a gaunt, absent, weather-worn and troubled look; it is to forget to be agreeably present; by the way it is to bear seed. Which seed has been said to have three chances out of four to fall by the wayside, or on stony ground, or among thorns.

In the six years of his University residence, Candace grew from a crude, bony output of a New England farm, to a large man, with high shoulders, and a dogmatic manner. His hair was stiff and black, his head large and square, his voice harsh. Latterly he grew sour and unsocial. He was not a comfortable

man.

I saw him last on a hot June day toward the end of examination end of examination week. The leaves of the elms were dusty. The Olympian undergraduate lolled out of windows, or stretched himself under the trees. The long, arched, leafy streets were noisy with old-clothes men, with expressmen coming and going, noisest of all with street urchins full of life and profanity, full of admira

tion for the golden Olympians who flowed small cash and condescended to be amused with them.

The entrance of the Hall that fronts the familiar corner, has groups of polished pillars about it, and the little stone faces of alien nations look down from the capitals of the pillars. A number of undergraduates sat on the steps, under the sad little stone faces. Below on the pavement the street urchins played marbles fiercely. The reek of the Olympian pipes went up.

Candace glowered at them across the street.

"They're good-looking animals," he said.

"The Olympians?"

"The Olympians. Ho! The Happy Immortals! Yes, they're on that plane where the wickedness of the little devils on the pavement amuses them. The gods sit midway between the little stone fates overhead, and the sinful human imps below. The business of the gods is to enjoy themselves. I leave tomorrow. Shall I see you again?”

"You're going to Germany? Let's hear from you over there, John." He stared gloomily ahead and was silent. Finally he asked: "Have you read Turgenieff's 'Fathers and Sons'? The sons are in a bad way unless,-"motioning across the street to the Olympians, -"they accept some such solution as that. Their fathers have set their teeth on edge."

He went down the street with his high, awkward shoulders peculiarly prominent. I did not know what he meant, and thought it probably of little use. "Fathers and Sons!" The children's teeth were said to be set on edge by reason of the father's diet. There was some acid in Candace's mouth by which the sweet

ness of the world was not sweet to him. What might his progenitors have eaten? The New Englander was said to have an italicized conscience. Candace was not a Puritan, however, in his cast of mind, I thought, but a Radical. He came from that interior land of high hills and falling streams, a certain Candace Hollow in the town of R. He held the "Beekman Scholarship" now, one of the best in the University. Where was he going next? Probably to some German university, whither the young man, hungry after knowledge, was likely to take his way in those days, for the rumor went that deeper delving after buried truth was done there than elsewhere. By and by a new scientific luminary would appear, haply a university professor, or a strident iconoclast and scorner of the meek habits of conventional thinking, a famous name and mounting career. Candace was no common man, and doubtless would find life sweeter than he thought. The Olympian opinion of it was not so far off after all. The small impish humanity on the pavement was more interesting than the little stone fates on the pillars, and it was by no means proved that when Olympians grow anxious and troubled about the vicious urchins, the fates are any less stony.

One of the urchins pegged his top at my feet, and swore at me for being in the way, and the Olympians on the steps were pleased with the exquisite unreason of it.

"In

Vishnu land what avatar?" Surely we had need of incarnations among us. We were a commonplace generation.

A low, red house with button-ball trees in front, stood in the midst of the valley. The road ran past the door. The green fields around were shadowed, though the sunlight was still yellow on the hill-tops. An ancient well-sweep stood at one side. In general it seemed a well-kept farm. There were roomy barns, and cattle clustered for the milking. I walked up the rough flag stones, raised an iron knocker, and heard some one call from a few yards away.

"Here, you vicious hobo! Come over and hoe potatoes."

It was no other than John Candace. He leaned on his hoe in the nearby garden, and looked at me sociably. Without more ado, we bent over the potatoes. The vines seemed to be in no very luxurious condition and rather bug eaten. From the standpoint of a dilettante, I thought them below the standard of ambition and philosophy, and said so.

"It's the potato bug," he said. "Some years ago he appeared in the world, or became apparent to the American farmer, spotted and slimy in the grub, and developing at maturity a picturesque shell. Some years from now he will disappear, and the universe and the American farmer will know him no more. It's the common history of parasitic species. Notice the conditions of Time, Space, and the other categories as they appear to the bug. Time lies between eighteen sixty something or thereabout, and nineteen hundred and something. Outside in both directions lie the Eternities. For reasons unknown to

him, he appears to be now and then smashed, separately, or in batches. The origin of evil seems to him an insoluble problem. He maintains a certain consistency which he calls the moral law, and wonders why the destinies respect it so capriciously as to raise potato vines for his benefit and then poison his daily bread with Paris green. Some bugs maintain the doctrine that there are two Overpowers, a benevolent one who raises the vines, and an evil one who is responsible for the Paris green. Some hold that there is but one who is wholly benevolent if bugs could understand the mystery."

We fell silent for a while, and then I asked:

"There's some one with you! Don't you touch Bert, you! Don't you dare!"

A little, withered old woman sat by a further window. Her lips quivered like a child's. Her eyes were pale and dead, her face painfully alive with flitting expressions. We went across to her, and Candace gave her my name and the circumstances of my coming with patient detail and reassuring tone. She listened, making curious motions with her hand, unconscious, I thought, and expressing, if one could interpret them, what the eyes of the seeing express unconsciously. I fancied that they expressed some fear or suspicion of Candace him

"What you see."

"I thought you were going to follow knowledge like a sinking star." "I came here." "What's the star?"

"I don't need any to hitch a farm wagon to."

"Oh, come off! You've buried yourself. Why, rust and ashes and disillusions? they're all right enough, but there are decent limits to that sort of thing."

He laughed shortly and did not answer. When the potato hills were al hoed, we left the garden, and he walked ahead to the door of the house, with his head bent and shoulders high. At the door he stopped.

"You won't find my family group cheerful," he said. "My mother is blind. My brother is insane. Come in."

sank back and turned away. He motioned me to follow and went toward the door of another roɔm, and opened it. The room within was scented with lilacs. The lilac bushes outside half filled the windows. A short, stocky man, wearing a linen duster, sat up by the window, startled, trembling, staring at us intently, suspiciously, with narrow frowning forehead. His hair was thin, his face pendulous and fleshy. Candace went through the same explanations, with the same careful detail and more repetition, the circumstances of my presence, its reasons and purposes. The other listened with a kind of lowering anxiety, and unconscious motions of the hands, oddly resembling the mother's. He made no comment at the end either, and turned away to hide his face, or to sniff the lilacs in the window. We went back to the other room, and found a maid servant laying the table, and Mrs. Candace rocking and murmuring.

button-ball trees, lit our pipes and blew smoke at the moon and stars, sending speculation climbing in the wake of the smoke, much as of old the custom was, under the college elms.

"Some."

"They think I'm plotting it day and night still, but I gave it uppretty soon. It wouldn't do. Bert's mind runs in grooves, what there is of it. My mother has been blind ten

"The month of June," I said. "The what!"

"June, she wears blue and green for my benefit by day, and purple and silver by night. She is worth while. And then I find health and tobacco worth while, and beef and coffee, and honest old men, and women with quiet eyes. Besides, there is the next book I shall read, and the next turn of the road, and the next day-break. Also, mine empty purse is interesting to So is the problem of the character and destiny of J. Candace."

"I see. I'd forgotten about you. Am I good literary material?" "Fair, only fair."

caňon of an idea about me, which— was my fault. I've never been able to fill up the cañon, though I'd like to make my mother feel that-that it's all right, you know. She was right about it in the first place. It wouldn't do. It's a bit mixed, of course, but after all they must be better off with me."

He seemed relieved somehow to get the cover off his mind, as if there were a dim, confused state of affairs there craving for light and interpretation, irksome to a man of positive opinions; and yet as if he felt it were more decent to keep the cover on. He fell silent again, and I to thinking of Mrs. Candace, working out the situation, fancying how one who was

"Bert has always been that way, but my father died about the time I left the University. An iron, Cromwellian kind of man he was, who stood by 'the sword of the Lord and Gideon,' and took Bert to be a proof that he had personally sinned against the Most High. Maybe he had, or some forebear of his, or mine. Your rutted Calvinist took snapshots pretty close to some hard sociological facts. Requiescat in pace. He was a just man, and more. He did his level best by me, and dug a college course for me out of the old farm, and died. Well-I thought Bert had better be in a hospital. It was what you might call an interested idea. However it was a mistake. They never got over it. You see?"

cious, if naturally in that way of feeling. One groped in the darkness and was afraid. She was wrapped up in Bert, like a mother hen in her maimed chick. She would always even have understood, and felt for and with him, more than for or with the other son, whose mind long ago began to swing away in the distant orbits and become alien to her sympathies. Weakness bands with weakness against strength. and his mother had certain likeness of feature. The knowledge that John was sacrificed somehow, was shackled and warped from his bent and ambition, would be a rasping knowledge to the mother, to whatever straining instinct of sympathy, if any, she had for him.

Bert

So here, in Candace Hollow, a spot fair enough by day to woo content

ment in and build a willow cabin at her gate, and by night an amethyst cup full to the brim with liquid moonlight, here was that old grey witch, Destiny, holding to the lips of a man as bitter a cup as she knew how to brew. It seemed so. The distrust that was Candace's daily portion must be a sharp ingredient. He was no cinque cento Italian, but a man with an italicized conscience, which, after all, was a thing of dignity. The Renaissance gospel, thought, lacked solidity. Two ideals strove within us to-day for mastery, the ideal of duty and. sacrifice, and the ideal of a full life, full, that is, to its limit of capacity and time. "Pagan" and "Christian" were not terms to cover these ideals, being specialized terms; nor were "the world" and "the soul" seeing that duty walked visibly in the market place, and unselfishness was one of the queens of the drawing-room. Yet John was throwing away large possibilities, I thought. Two sad, meagre, bat-like creatures distrusted and clung to him with painful claws.

But by this time he had long since dropped the subject, and was now laying down the law on some great German's last great book— "Grundsätze der Socialpolitik," or the like, speaking of something he called "the Mühlhausen-Lieber theory."

What sharp analysis he had, what vigor and earnestness, what dominance and assertion! One of those

minds that gather power from their own motions, that flow with mass and speed, wherever allowed to follow their natural direction.

"Why, Marx was no fool, at least. 'What is equality?' he asks. 'Is it where all men get coats of the same size, or where each man gets a coat that fits him?' A searching quesA searching ques

tion. If they all get coats of the same size, few will be well fitted; if all coats that fit, that is a pleasant dream of happy inequalities; if you must have both fit and sameness, you must have a tailor for the men and cut them to a fashion as well as the coats, an artificial humanity as well as an artificial environment. The tailors themselves must be retailored. Ha! Must they? Man "must be born again." What? that's

sociological operation that I know of. Well, Marx was as much of a crank as Mühlhausen, but no more so. You can't put him down with a copybook formula. I say, this is no quibbling of the schools, and no striker's irrational brick heaved at a policeman either. I'm a Radical, am I? That means nothing. Radically what? No, I'm a sociologist who means business."

"Do you think you're going to find that calling effective and compatible with farming, in Candace Hollow?"

He was silent some moments, and then said harshly: "No!" and rose, and we fell to pacing to and fro in the yard.

"No! But you needn't hamstring me like that."

"I beg your pardon, John. Go on with your categorical imperatives, which are interesting and foolish."

"Oh, you rosy hedonist!"

So he talked on, his longing for the big, intellectual world glowing sultrily through his talk. The moon shone through the button-ball trees, as we paced the yard from the garden of depressed potato vines to the well with its lofty sweep, and our pacing brought us past the open door to which the flag-stone path led up from the dusty road. Candace's voice stopped in mid-sen